AMD Makes HIP Ray Tracing Libraries Open-Source, Allowing Easier Integration Into Games & Apps

AMD Makes HIP Ray Tracing Libraries Open-Source, Allowing Easier Integration Into Games & Apps 1

AMD has finally made its HIP Ray-Tracing library an open-source asset, allowing developers to incorporate RT capabilities into applications and leverage them.

Phoronix reports that AMD has made its HIP RT library open-source to make coding on HIP-based applications much more straightforward.

AMD's HIP (Heterogeneous-Compute Interface) is a "hybrid" API, allowing programmers to write a "universal" code executable on multiple interfaces, such as those from AMD and NVIDIA. It acts as a translation layer, allowing the use of one computing platform over the other, and it acts as a great asset in the development realm; with the open-sourcing of RT, developers are expected to benefit immensely.

While AMD hasn't disclosed the reason behind the open-sourcing of HIP RT, it may be a result of AMD's CEO, Lisa Su, fulfilling the request of an AI startup, TinyCorp, after it ran into multiple issues due to some elements of AMDGPU libraries not being open-sourced. It isn't certain whether HIP RT was a part of it, but the decision does seem to be influenced; however, regardless of that, it is great to see AMD taking specific steps to empower developers more on the platform.

This release adds the following

Multi-level instancing

Triangle pairing

AS Compaction

Optimized BVH build speed

Ray triangle intersection.

Ray custom primitive intersection.

Ray mask to filter geometries.

Several bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) options.

Load and store BVH handy for offline construction.

BVH import.

Motion blur.

HIP RT runs on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. HIP and CUDA® APIs are dynamically loaded so you do not need to have these SDKs if you have these dlls installed with the driver package. Hardware accelerated ray-tracing only works on RDNA 2 GPUs (Radeon RX 6000 series or newer).

The supported AMD GPU architecture families are:

Navi3x (Radeon RX 7000 series).

Navi2x (Radeon RX 6000 series).

Navi1x (Radeon RX 5000 series).

You can download the open-source HIP RT libraries from GPUOpen.com since that is where AMD made the announcement.

News Source: Phoronix